It’s been two weeks since the conclusion of Boomi World 2024, and now that the dust has settled, it is clear that it was one of the most impactful and visionary conferences we have seen from Boomi in years. Leading off with the announcement of significant acquisitions in the API Management space, we saw a company that was focused on improving its current offerings and charting a path through the most significant disruption the tech industry has seen since the dot com boom. In this post, we will break down the mixture of immediate features, market-shaping announcements and thought leadership from Boomi World into three categories: Today, Tomorrow and the Future.
Today – Task automation and paper cuts
Boomi World served as a great reminder of the work that Boomi is putting into improving and widening the platform. Leading the way were
- The rebranding of Boomi AtomSphere to Boomi Enterprise Platform and Master Data Hub to DataHub. While these may seem like small changes to everyone except marketing teams, they signify the way that Boomi has reimagined how the components of the platform fit together and the solutions that it can provide.
- Task automation. Now in beta, Boomi’s answer to self-service consumer-facing integrations looks like an excellent option for power users and others who want to automate repetitive processes in their personal workflows.
- Fixing “papercuts”. The announcement that Boomi has a team dedicated to improving the day-to-day experience of using the platform, sanding down rough edges, was perhaps the highlight of the conference for dedicated integrators. Boomi has always had a good user experience, but tidying up minor annoyances is always greatly appreciated.
- Boomi AI. It is hard to believe that it has only been six months since Boomi launched Boomi GPT to provide the ability to create integrations using a natural language interface. The launch of four new AI agents to provide guidance, documentation, data tracking and answers shows that Boomi is staying at the forefront of AI in integration.
Tomorrow – Building blocks for an AI world
We saw Boomi’s vision of integration as a key enabler for AI transformation in full swing, along with their plans for the coming year. Across the gamut of the Boomi Enterprise platform investments are being made to ensure that Boomi stays at the forefront of this wave – and so do its customers.
- Acquisitions of APIIDA and Mashery. Boomi sees APIs as a key interaction and control point for AI systems, and its acquisitions show its commitment to this idea. The strong federated API gateway management from APIIDA and cloud-first API management from Mashery will allow Boomi to move into a leadership position in this space and complement the investments being made in both the AI and integration platform space.
- Pure-play ETL. While Boomi has always been a capable platform for ETL, the sheer scale of data required to support complex AI scenarios has been a challenge to deliver within the standard Boomi runtime. A dedicated ETL platform will close this capability gap in the Boomi Enterprise platform and will become increasingly important with the rise of RAG and other AI customisation technologies.
- Agent Garden. A colourful marketing term for an AI agent catalogue, the key attribute of the Boomi Agent Garden is the fact that it is open to third parties. By allowing third parties to contribute their own agents to work within the Boomi environment, Boomi customers stand to gain a much broader set of capabilities than would be possible for Boomi to deliver internally. Led by Vianai’s Boomi FinTalk agent, the first crop of agents in the “garden” show the promise of this strategy.
The Future – Integration with, and by, AI
After the excitement of acquisitions and new features has died down, it is the vision of the future outlined by Ed Macosky, Boomi’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, which has stayed with us the most.
Mackosky posed the question of what integration would look like in an AI-first world. Would there still be a need for the traditional integration patterns that have been used for the last 50 years? Do we still need the concept of a “connector” with its tight association with the contracts and methods of a system, or will it be supplanted by AI agents for each system? How can we provide system and process governance in an AI-driven world?
Demonstrating how AI agents could be embedded in integration processes and learning how to interact with systems without needing a structured connection, Boomi’s vision of how to answer these questions was compelling. Macosky explained how a comprehensive business rules framework could be used to enforce governance over these systems, providing control and observability of the actions performed by the agents.
An inflection point for Boomi
It’s been a long time since we’ve been presented with a truly transformative vision of integration, and what was shown at Boomi World 2024 definitely counted as such. When considered alongside the feet-on-the-ground improvements being delivered to the Boomi Enterprise Platform and the acquisitions and investments coming in the near term, we can see that Boomi is a company with a clear view of the future and the ambition and drive to get there.
